By Rod Rowe
Galen Johns, who moved from New Paris to Greencroft Manor IV in 2004, is a third generation Mennonite preacher.
“My father was a preacher and my grandfather was a preacher,” Johns said.
He was raised and graduated from school in Millersburg and attended a church school in Virginia and also classes at Goshen College. He was ordained in 1948 and began his service as the first pastor of the new Benton Mennonite Church, which was started out of the Clinton Frame congregation.
He was married May 16, 1943, to Edith and they raised four sons and a daughter. Edith suffered a stroke in 1966 and became aphasic. Galen continues to be active in a local aphasia support group.
She died Feb. 5, after more than 65 years of marriage.
He called his marriage to Edith “a strong marriage” and attributes his long life to her influence in changing his diet.
“When we got married, my wife was surprised that I didn’t know that 40 percent of our diet should be fruits and vegetables,” he said.
She soon got him on the right track.
At their first parsonage at Benton, the couple planted a large garden. She canned the vegetables they raised.
“Now we buy everything at the store,” he said. He does some cooking at his apartment and enjoys two or three REAL meals a week at the senior center.
Johns said he was something of a pioneer in premarital counseling, speaking with couples and giving them reading material before he married them.
“A couple things led me to do that,” he said. “The first couple I worked with weren’t even in our church.”
Johns explained that in the 1940s and 1950s, preachers had to have other means of supporting their families and he raised chickens, sold eggs, worked in heating and cooling and then taught third-, fourth- and fifth-grades at Clinton Christian School for nine years.
“Those were good days,” he said. “I enjoyed teaching.”
He went on to explain that teaching was his favorite thing throughout his life.
“I still have former students come up to me and tell me they appreciated me,” he said. “I enjoyed pastoral work, too.”
Still, he had to work a day job that allowed the flexibility to allow him to complete pastoral duties.
In 1957 the family moved to Saginaw, Mich., where he was interim pastor for a year at Ninth Street Mennonite Church, a “mission” church in an African-American neighborhood. Then in 1962 he became pastor of the newly-organized Bonneyville Mennonite Church, east of Bristol.
The family moved to Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, in 1970, where he served in the Erb Street Mennonite Church for seven years before returning to Indiana. Johns was a long-time secretary of the Mennonite church conference.
He traveled to 47 of the 48 contiguous states, many times combining the trips with church meetings.
“We did a lot of driving,” he said.
A few years ago he worked part-time delivering buses for Superior Coach. On one of the trips, Edith and he each drove a bus to a San Francisco dealer.
“I don’t drive long distances now,” he said, but he is a substitute at Greencroft to shuttle mail to the post office. He commented that now he spends more for car insurance than he does for gasoline.
Other current volunteer work includes helping one day a week at bingo at the managed care area and visiting friends in the Greencroft community.
And in the past two years Johns has developed two monologues, “memory work,” he calls it, that he performs at churches and around the community.
Johns first developed a 30-minute performance of his interpretation of the Biblical character Job, researching in the Bible and other reference books.
Johns gave his Job performance this week, has done it 10 times, six times in churches and four times on the Greencroft campus.
His second project is performing Charles Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol,” which is a 50-minute monologue.
He will next perform “A Christmas Carol” Dec. 9 at 1:30 p.m. at Greencroft.
Besides reading and watching news on TV, Johns enjoys walking around the campus where he lives.
“I’m known as the fast walker around here,” Johns said. “If I don’t walk in normal activity one day, I get out and walk about a mile and a half on campus. And if it is bad weather, I can walk all the halls in this building and that adds up to 1.1 mile. There are more than 130 apartments here on one story.”
Johns said his independent living apartment at Manor IV is a great place to live, especially since it is maintenance free for him.
“The most asked question we have is ‘why didn’t we do this sooner,’ ” he said. “A few here don’t like it, but they decided that before they came here.”
